Don’t Click: A Survey of Youth Experiences with Hate & Violent Extremism Online

Forward

Hate and extremism are prevalent online and pose unique and substantial risks for youth who, like myself, use various online platforms daily.

Harmful ideas, violence, and trauma can become deeply rooted in young people who experience hateful and extremist rhetoric, comments, and content on online platforms. The result can be victimization and the adoption of some of these views

To deal with these threats and negative impacts, youth themselves must act. Youth voices and perspectives on this problem are often absent from research and policy discussions. As such, young people supporting young people is the basis of the Don’t click! Initiative. The starting point for this initiative was the research discussed in this report.

The research project and survey results discussed in this publication seek to better understand how and where youth encounter hateful and extremist ideas and sentiments. It also seeks to identify ideas youth have for addressing these problems.

I felt that for any counter-hate initiative to be effective, resonant, and taken seriously by those who have power it was necessary to be grounded in evidence. This survey is a cornerstone of this research and part of the Don’t Click! Initiative.

Working with peers, researchers at the Organization for the Prevention of Violence (OPV), teachers, administrators, school boards, the Edmonton Police Service (EPS), and the City of Edmonton, this survey amassed more than 850 respondents and collected new insight into the dangers of hate and extremism online for youth.

This research contributes to an understanding of where youth encounter online hate and extremism, how they responded when they encountered it, and going forward, what the next steps are in addressing these problems. I believe, as a society, it is essential to support youth in their endeavours to address the problems of significance and listen to their voices and solutions to issues they experience firsthand.

The Don’t Click! initiative has blossomed into an active youth group based in Edmonton. With the support of EPS, the City of Edmonton, REACH Edmonton, and the OPV, this group of committed youth have developed resources and workshops to educate young people across Alberta on the importance of digital literacy, digital citizenship, empathy, and ways to properly combat hate and extremism online.

-Henry Kerr

Introduction

This report discusses the results of a youth survey on hate and violent extremism and is part of the Don’t Click! Youth Initiative. It was conducted with the support of the Organization for the Prevention of Violence, based in Edmonton, Alberta.

859 respondents with an average age of 16, all located in Alberta, completed the survey between December 2020 and June 2021. It sought to identify where youth encountered hateful and extremist content online, how they reacted to it, and what they believed were the most appropriate responses to these problems.

The definition of hate used for the survey and provided to respondents was “the use of hostile language or violence towards individuals based on their culture, race, religion, disability, sex, gender or sexual orientation.” By comparison, violent extremism was defined in the survey as “the beliefs and actions of people who support or use violence in the name of a cause.”

Of note, and significant concern is the finding that 86 percent of respondents reported encountering hate online, and 72 percent reported encountering violent extremism. A more detailed discussion of survey results follows.

Youth are exposed to a diverse, ever-changing, and largely unregulated world of entertainment, information, disinformation, online social networks, and all of the benefits and hazards this entails.

In 2018 the Pew Research Center interviewed roughly 750 teens (13-17 years old) and found that 95% of them had a smartphone and roughly half were online “almost constantly.”¹ Several years later, in the context of a pandemic that has necessitated shifts to online schooling and socialization, that dependence has most certainly grown. When asked if their school-aged children were spending more or less time online during the Covid-19 pandemic, 72% of parents indicated increased usage.²

Youth are at the forefront of a global revolution in accessing information, interacting with others, and subsequently shaping how they situate themselves in the world. There are, of course, unknown hazards and outcomes in this revolution, one of which is interacting with disinformation, hatred, bigotry, and extremist content generated by a growing and diffuse host of bad actors on the Internet.

One study conducted by a technology company using Artificial Intelligence to detect online content during the Covid-19 pandemic found a 70% increase in hate “between children and teens” in online chat and a 40% increase in “toxicity” among young people in video game chats.³

Hate and extremism online have been extensively studied. For example, around the spread of specific ideologies and belief systems, the role of online networks in driving hate-motivated violence, and the negative effects of communities targeted by hate.

However, several questions remain around the impacts of the phenomena on youth – the short, immediate, and long-term outcomes on, inter alia, their mental health, social networks and identities, and beliefs.

Additionally, there has been little meaningful engagement with youth that seeks to elicit their ideas for how best to tackle these issues. This survey and its results represent a modest attempt to address some of our gaps in knowledge and understanding. 

Previous Studies and Findings on Youth Engagement with Hate and Extremism

The current heightened awareness and attention around extremism and hate, the proliferation of the use of social media – particularly amongst youth – has led to a series of previous, topical studies.

In particular, the potential for youth to encounter or be the target or victim of social media propaganda tools designed to propagate extremist or hateful content is highly salient given the disproportionate amount of time this demographic spends online.

For example, during the height of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL) power in the early to mid-2010s, the group weaponized social media to disseminate their propaganda and recruit young individuals from the West.⁴

To date, given the growing importance of this topic, there have been several extensive surveys conducted on the rate of exposure and impact of online violent extremist and hate content on youth. Many of these are part of a broader body of literature that investigates criminal behaviors online, particularly cyber-bullying. The key difference between cyberbullying and hate or extremist material is that the former targets a single individual while the latter targets a collective identity.⁵

Unsurprisingly, a growing body of evidence suggests youth exposure to hate and extremism, both on and offline, is harmful. This can include short-term emotional impacts like feelings of fear, loneliness, and unhappiness,⁶ and longer-term impacts like normalizing and eventually reinforcing hateful beliefs and discrimination against targeted groups.⁷ For individuals within the targeted group, exposure to such content can lead to modified behaviors due to fear and emotional distress,⁸ and defensive attitudes that may impede social relationships in the future.⁹

Many early studies in this area of research approached the issue from the routine activity theory (RAT), which purports that youth are more likely to be victimized in spaces that include a motivated offender and little, if any, capable guardianship.¹⁰

Researchers argue that the Internet provides an opportunistic environment where motivated offenders can easily access their targets in a mostly unsupervised and unmoderated space.

This is supported in studies examining the use of racial or ethnic-based language between moderated and unmoderated online teen chatrooms. These studies found that negative racial or ethnic language appears to permeate most in unmoderated chatrooms.¹¹

What’s more, the Internet provides a unique environment where young individuals do not necessarily need to come into direct contact with a motivated offender. Instead, targets need only read or passively consume materials posted at some time before their exposure.¹²

By the early 2010s, researchers found that the rate of exposure to extremist or hate-related content increases the more the individual uses technology,¹³ especially as the individual enters spaces online with higher proportions of extremist or hate-related actors, groups, and content.¹⁴ The likelihood of accessing online hate sites is especially acute in older adolescents and youth who are male¹⁵ and in those who exhibit high levels of sensation or risk-seeking behavior.¹⁶

Other studies have found that women and people of colour, in general, are more likely to perceive hate speech and hate crimes as more serious and harmful than men and Caucasians.¹⁷

Later studies specifically investigated the rate of online exposure to extremist and hate materials online. In one pioneering study, Hawdon et al. (2014) surveyed 1,032 American youth between 15–30.¹⁸

They collected basic demographic data, targets of the hate speech, the website where it was encountered, how the individual found the website, and how disturbing the respondent found the material. Of this total, 53% said they had encountered online hate speech, and nearly 16% of those were the target of hate speech. 

Most respondents did not deliberately access the page but instead found it accidentally. Those who accidentally found the content were also more likely to indicate they were disturbed by it. 

As for the websites where respondents encountered the content, Facebook and YouTube were most frequently indicated, followed by general message boards, Tumblr, Blogs, and image boards (such as 4chan). Hawdon also included predictive analyses of the likelihood of exposure by several demographic factors. 

Of all ethnic and race variables, those who identified as “White” were significantly less likely to encounter online hate materials. In contrast, Hispanic respondents were nearly 1.7 times as likely to encounter it. Younger male respondents were also more likely to encounter hate material. 

Other studies have since followed in the footsteps of Hawdon et al. (2014; 2015). For example, one European survey found that 20% of youth in Europe had been exposed to or encountered hateful messages and content online.¹⁹

Tellingly, the study found that the rate of exposure has steadily increased compared to initial findings in 2010. A subsequent study by Blaya (2019) concluded from a survey of 1,189 youth between the ages of 11-20 in France that nearly one-third of respondents were exposed to hate content online.²⁰

Nienierza et al. (2021) examined the experience of 1,061 German adolescents. They focused not only on the rate of exposure to extremist content but also the ability of youth to identify the content as extremist.²¹

This study fills a gap in the literature that, for the most part, assumes that youth understand and can identify dangerous content when they see it. The survey results indicate that consistent with previous studies, roughly one-third of respondents encountered extremist content – most frequently on social networking sites. However, only 59% of the respondents understood the researchers’ definition of extremist content and exposure to content. 

Another study conducted by Harriman et al. (2020) of adolescents from two high schools in Massachusetts (USA) found that exposure to hate messages is significantly correlated with the use of Twitter and Houseparty. The study also found that communication with a stranger (vs. a youth’s peer group) increased the risk of exposure to hateful content.²²

Methodology

This study created an original survey consisting of 19 questions to investigate youth online behavior as it relates to exposure to hate and extremism. 

The survey recruited Alberta youth based on a convenience sampling method. Before dissemination, the survey received approval from the Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB), and a link to the survey was posted and advertised on a variety of online school websites and in-person announcements. These included school zone (an online hub of information for students), individual school announcement boards, in classrooms via teachers sharing the survey, on school Instagram pages, and on the Instagram pages of other online accounts supporting the project. 

Students from across the Edmonton Public School Board Division had the opportunity to participate, as did two secondary schools in Calgary. 

The survey was live from December 7th, 2020, until June 6th, 2021. For respondents under 18, the survey required prior parental approval. Parents were required to first read the questions in the survey and type their names to indicate that consent had been given. This consent allowed the youth to begin answering questions. Participants were also informed that all questions in the survey were optional, answers were anonymous, and all participants were given a list of community resources if they needed support. 

The 19 questions surveyed a range of responses from youth:

• basic demographic information (age, gender, identification as a visible minority or member of the LGBTQ2S+ community);
• social media and online platforms used on a regular basis;
• which social media and online platforms they have encountered hate or extremist content;
• whether they have encountered hate or extremist content on the Dark Web; 
• whether they personally experienced hate on or offline;
• how they responded to hate or extremist content online in the past;
• and a range of questions that ask what they believe youth can do to combat hate and extremism online.

Once the survey results were anonymized and cleaned, the researchers used Stata/SE 17.0 to obtain descriptive statistics and conduct analyses.  

Results

In total, 859 youth completed the survey. Descriptive statistics of survey respondent demographics will be presented first. 

Survey Respondent Demographics

The average age of the respondents was 16, with the oldest being 23 and the youngest being 12 years old. Most respondents (91%) were between the ages of 15 and 17; 6% were older than 18, and 3% were under 15. 

In terms of gender, 53% identified as female, 44% identified as male, and 3% identified as something other than female or male (this includes non-binary, transgender, gender-fluid, and agender). 

Of 859 respondents, 801 reported whether they identified as a member of the LGBTQ2S+ community, and 760 stated whether they identified as a visible minority. Accordingly, 74% of respondents stated that they do not identify as members of the LGBTQ2S+ community, 19% reported they do, and 7% declined to answer. 

Alternatively, a near-even split of 43% of respondents reported identifying as a visible minority, and 45% reported identifying as a non-minority. In total, 12% declined to answer. 

It is important to pay attention to intersectional trends in surveys such as this. 

Of all female respondents who answered the visible minority question, 49% reported identifying as such; similarly, 48% of male respondents reported identifying as a visible minority. Conversely, nearly 60% of respondents who reported identifying as something other than male or female also identify as a visible minority. 

Of all female respondents who answered the LGBTQ2S+ question, 25% report identifying as a member of the community; 9% of male respondents report identifying as a member of the community. Conversely, 100% of respondents who identified as something other than male or female also identify as a member of the LGBTQ2S+ community.